Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Chrome: increasing browsing security

Chrome has quite a few features that increase your browsing security in the background.

Here are three that you can implement yourself.

1. Multi-user support. Create a new user profile, and run things like your internet banking from the new tab. All processes are sandboxed, so if you get an exploit from your general web browsing account/window it will not be able to grab content from your banking window. Just make sure you are using different Chrome accounts!

Goto Settings > Personal Stuff > Add New User

Then go back in and edit the name and icon

When running multiple users you get a new icon top right. Click on it to switch

If you sign in to your Google account, consumer or Apps account, it remembers your bookmarks, plugins, browser extensions etc. Like you'd expect really with all that data being stored in Google's Cloud

2. chrome://flags is a (relatively) unadvertised way of controlling lots of behind the scenes features. One in particular you should consider

Click to playEnables a "click to play" option in the plug-in content settings.

Enable

When a web site has content that calls a plugin of browser extension, you will be required to click first. Like Flashblock on steroids.

3. chrome://plugins/ gives you a list of all the plugins on your entire system you have installed. And likely its a scary long list. If you see something on there you aren't expecting, then disable it. As an example, Chrome shows Safari plugins